


if your hands need to break

by firstaudrina



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, Missing Scene, alternate season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-15
Updated: 2018-08-15
Packaged: 2019-06-27 14:20:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15687135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: Maia babysits Possessed Jace during Season 3. Alternate scene.





	if your hands need to break

**Author's Note:**

> I don't fully remember the timeline of 3a, so this is set somewhere after Maia sees Jordan again, before she leaves town, and while Possessed Jace is still cooling his heels in a cage at Magnus'. 
> 
> Written for [this prompt](https://stainofmylove.dreamwidth.org/255390.html?thread=6977694#cmt6977694).

He’s been watching her. His eyes gleam in the dim glow of Magnus’ apartment the way a cat’s do in the dark, catching all that straining light and reflecting it back out. There’s something electric about his eyes right now. He’s smirking faintly. It is hard to trust that he can be held by magic, but Maia has been assured that he can. She shows no trepidation either way, shoulders back and arms crossed, eyebrow raised.

“Hello, Maia,” he says, playful.

“Hello, Demon Jace,” she replies. 

He smiles but it feels like there are rows and rows of teeth behind that first set, each getting sharper and sharper. This Jace is a marionette, his strings pulled by some unseen creature that renders his familiar features and gestures uncanny and odd. He’s a little bit like the drunk Jace she’s steered away from the bar towards a table of Seelie girls more than once, but she wouldn’t get that close to this one without checking for knives first.

“What are you doing here?” Demon Jace asks, a pastiche of Jace’s casual concern. 

The others are searching down some book or artifact that could exorcise this thing out of him. Maia was the only free babysitter, and she’d have done anything to get out of a room with both Simon and Jordan in it. Even face down an ancient monster wearing the face of someone she knows. She actually had a lot of experience with that, depending on how you looked at it.

She drags a chair over and straddles it, arms folded on the back like a too-cool substitute teacher. “You’re an all-powerful demon,” she says as she surveys him. “You tell me.”

He studies her. “Why aren’t you on the bus?”

Her stomach jumps. She hadn’t said anything, hadn’t told anyone, the ticket burning at the bottom of her purse. Her first instinct had been to leave. To run away. It shamed her but it was what she wanted, to run right out of her skin. Her reaction shows only in a slight widening of the eyes, a growing horror.

“He wouldn’t care if you went, obviously,” Jace continued. “Simon. He’s still in love with _her_. Every other woman’s just going to be a proxy. Even my sister. You know he’s going to fuck my sister? As soon as you turn your back.”

Maia thinks of Isabelle sitting down with her at the Jade Wolf. Inviting herself to the table and smugly informing Maia what a catch Simon was, as though she didn’t know, as though someone couldn’t possibly have a viable reason for avoiding romance if the guy was good enough. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” she says evenly.

“Aren’t you calm and collected. Afraid you’ll turn?”

“Afraid I’ll rip you apart?”

He laughs. “Please,” he says, challenging. “Try me. I can’t turn you to dust like your boyfriend can, but ask Clary how her neck feels lately.”

“How dumb do you think I am?” Maia tilts her head, lifts her eyebrows expectantly. “I know you want to be let out. You think you’re gonna goad me into a fight? _Please_. If I wanted to get my claws into Jace Herondale, I’d have done it already. I had plenty of chances.”

“Can’t do what somebody did you to?”

Maia stiffens. 

His eyes travel over the gashes engraved on her neck. “Do you think it makes you stronger not to take revenge? Some might say it lacks imagination. Don’t you think you’d feel better, to have his blood bubbling over your hands?”

“Jace’s?” Maia suggests, purposefully misunderstanding. He knows what she’s doing, she can see those eyes laughing. “Like I said, I already heard that song. Not interested in a repeat.”

“It would free him from me,” the thing says. “If you killed him. And it would save everyone else, too. You know how to make hard decisions for the greater good. What’s one Shadowhunter in the balance of all that? One who used you to prove a point he took back almost immediately.”

“The using was mutual,” Maia says, unsettled. She pushes up from the chair and comes closer, dropping to a crouch in front of him. He’s sitting cross-legged, like he’s about to meditate. “Are you still in there?”

“In this prison? Don’t you have eyes?”

“Shut up, not you.” She searches his face. “Jace. Are you still in there? Did you feel it when he pushed her off that roof?”

She watches for a wave, a flicker, a spark. All she sees is the sheen of the thing operating him, its amusement and wariness. 

“It’d be better for you if you did get out of town,” he says. “There’s going to be a _big_ explosion.” 

“What do you care —“ she starts, but then she thinks: a flicker.

Maia stands and goes back to her seat. She watches the thing inside Jace and it watches her back. “Give me the best you got,” she tells it. “We have time to kill.”


End file.
